Data memory design and exploration for low-power embedded systems

In embedded system design, the designer has to choose an on-chip memory configuration that is suitable for a specific application. To aid in this design choice, we present a memory exploration procedure based on three performance metrics, namely, cache size, the memory access time and the energy consumption. We show the importance of including energy in the performance metrics, since an increase in the cache size and line size reduces the memory access time but does not necessarily reduce the energy consumption. The memory exploration procedures enable us to find the cache configuration (cache size, line size) that satisfies the area and time constraints while minimizing the energy consumption, and the cache configuration that satisfies the area and energy constraints while minimizing the memory access time. The exploration procedures for cache configuration is very efficient since it considers only a selected set of candidate points. Finally, we validate our exploration procedures by running simulation experiments on MediaBench applications.